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THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



Oct. 6, 1904. 



this true of September. One day this week the thermome- 

 ter stood at SS degrees, and the next as low as 40 degrees. 



In the main it has been a delightfully cool, pleasant 

 summer; hut noi good bee-weather. 



Looking' After the Beeswax. 



MRS. ANTES AND PART OP HER APIART. 



to just as weak a condition as if the other manipulations 

 had been made, and with less trouble. 



Mrs. Antes says she prefers this to clipping the queen, 

 but the two things are quite separate. Clipping a queen's 

 wings does not in the least prevent a second swarm, but 

 does prevent the first swarm from going off with the old 

 queen. 



Our Changeable Climate. 



What a changeable climate we have had this summer. 

 One day very warm, and the next cool. And especially is 



Bee-keepers, as a rule, are such very busy people that 

 everything that can be set aside during the harvest is likely 

 to be postponed to some future time, and looking after the 

 beeswax is one of the things likely to be so treated. Per- 

 haps few of us are as careful as we might be about saving 

 the little bits of wax. If we have some handy receptacle in 

 the apiary into which they can be thrown they are much 

 more likely to be saved, and they are well worth saving. 

 Now that the harvest is over, it is a pretty good plan to get 

 all the wax into marketable shape at once. 



Paste of Marshmallows Root With Honey. 



Steep Js ounces of marshmallows root in }< pint of 

 water ; add 3 ounces of gum arable. When the gum is dis- 

 solved, let settle, and pour off. Replace on a slow fire and 

 add 3'2 ounces of liquid honey, stirring constantly. Add 

 the white of an egg beaten to a froth. When it will no 

 longer stick to the fingers pour upon a surface powdered 

 with starch. 



The " Old Reliable " seen through New and Unreliable Glasses. By E. E. Hasty, Sta. B Rural, Toledo, Ohio. 



OUBEN AND HER RETINUE — WHAT SHALL WE CALL THEM ? 



Good thing to have a fixed name for each of the essen- 

 tial things of apiculture iy we don' I try /or too terrible a sort 

 of Jixedriess. When a man calls a thing by an intelligent 

 name it is rarely advisable to scold him. Virgil got praise 

 instead of dispraise for using 12 different names for bee- 

 hive. Thirteen out of 24 experts indorse colony as the 

 proper name for queen and retinue. No other name gets 

 enough to stand up in a row. Such things do not have to 

 "go on all fours", not at all, else colony would not do. 

 Among human beings a colony is a large number of fami- 

 lies which have branched off from some previous state and 

 founded an organism of their own ; while queen and 40,000 

 bees are all one family. Yet the term family gets almost 

 no support. One reason may be that our minds do not take 

 kindly to the idea of a family of such enormous size. Also, 

 by such nomenclature, we lose the likeness between the 

 founding of a colony and the swarming of bees, and we 

 want to keep that. Also, when we think of a family, the 

 idea of each member, or nearly each member, filling a niche 

 altogther his own, is prominent in mind ; and a myriad of 

 repetitions of the same identical unit make the term seem 

 incongruous on that account. 



There is also a contest between queen and mother as 

 name for the first lady of the coop. Queen fails to express 

 important functional relations ; but likewise mother fails 

 to express other important ideas. Fight would be nearly 

 a stand-off if we were beginning brand new ; and we are 

 not doing that by any means. As queen has long been in 

 full possession she is quite certain to stick. 



How nice it would be if we could all have as much faith 

 as G. W. Demaree I He says, " I bf lieve the mother honey- 

 bee, with her brood, would be satisfied with the name of 

 ' hive-hold of bees ' ". With such faith spread abroad, the 

 horizon would be full of mountains moving and skipping 

 around. Page 596. 



ALFALFA EXPENSIVE WHERE WATER IS A LUXURY. 



Ten crops of alfalfa in a season, and two tons at a 

 crop ! I don't know but we shall have to borrow some of 

 the faith mentioned above, friend Cook. 



But here's an important point Prof. Cook sets before us 

 which is meaty, and unthought of by most of us. We con- 

 template oft the wax-honey ratio, what is the hay-water 

 ratio ? How many pounds of water does a plant have to use 

 in order to lift out of the ground and elaborate one pound 

 of dry product ? Guess I Five pounds. Twenty pounds. 

 Prof. Cook tells us the average is 325 pounds ! And alfalfa 

 uses much more than the average — something over 400 

 pounds. It calls for the whole of six inches of rain (fallen 

 on some distant surface perchance) to make one full crop. 

 This is not one of the merits of alfalfa, but one of its worst 

 shortcomings. Where water is expensive, and all has to be 

 brought, alfalfa hay is too awfully expensive. Page 597. 



,CLEOME AND RED CLOVER GOOD SPREADERS. 



Pretty good spread has cleome if one select plant opens 

 4,209 flowers at a time. Still I imagine a select red clover 

 can be found to beat it. Say 50 heads on the plant, and 200 

 florets to the head. That would be 10,000. A red clover, 

 give it good soil and room enough, spreads itself immensely. 

 Page 598. 



ARE THE BIRDS GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY ? 



" When Greek meets Greek then comes the tug ", etc. 

 When the professional, college entomologists meet the pro- 

 fessional sportsmen and nature-observers on the king-bird 

 question, there's a chance to see fur fly. H. B. Terril, page 

 604, and the Virginia bee-keeper, page 622, seem rather to 

 come out ahead so far. Failing to find bees in a bird's 

 crop is no evidence of its innocence. If you, Mr. Professor, 

 should shoot a dozen country schoolboys in the clover 

 fields, and totally fail to find a single bumble-bee in any of 

 their stomachs, all that wouldn't prove that the schoolboy 

 never catches bumble-bees to suck their honey. Certainly 

 guilty of doing just that trick sometimes. The slender- 

 billed birds, such as perforate and suck grapes, can proceed 

 in the same way with bees. The redbird which caught and 

 dropped 85 bees on Mr. Terril's hive seems to have done 

 this. Birds with blunt bills can proceed as the schoolboys 

 do, tearing the bee apart and swallowing only liquid con- 

 tents — nothing that would appear on a post-mortem exami- 

 nation. If a bill is big enough it might be used as a crush- 



